Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [376]
“Annie Rothschild is really psychic. And over a year ago Annie said that that one is going to have bad luck.”
And in the hallway after that first date she hadn’t let him kiss her. She’d been very self-possessed and calm and had acted like she knew how to take care of herself. He’d taken her out again, until, suddenly, he had been going steadily with her. Funny how at first he hadn’t even been able to kiss her and now, he’d copped her cherry.
He looked out the window and saw that the train was passing Fifty-seventh Street, and he noted the trees of Jackson Park below, and a block distant. And then the train was slowing beside the platform, and he saw people hastening to the car doors, and the trees and buildings of Fifty-sixth Street, and beyond it a patch of the lake, deep blue against the cloudy day. Two young fellows who looked like University students headed the procession of people entering the car, and they took the vacant seat in front of Studs. An asthmatic, graying man sat beside him and began making whistling sounds as he breathed.
“Then you really think that Annie Rothschild is psychic?”
“She’s very good and she does it all with cards . . .”
The train was running, stopping again at Hyde Park Boulevard, and Catherine, what would he say to her when they met? He could see the tall apartment hotel buildings stacked beside the lake, and then the lake stretched, blue and gray and dotted with white-caps, on outward into a gray curtain of deep mist. He looked out at the lake, which was like a ruffling coat of gray and white, and he heard the two fellows in the seat ahead talking earnestly.
“Hal, we’re old friends, and we were pals in high school together, and I’m talking to you for your own good when I tell you not to waste your time on such stuff.”
“Jack, I’m not wasting my time. I’m beginning to get my eyes opened for me.”
“You know what Mr. Boardman said when we took Poly Sci 101 in our freshman year. He said that Communism was an asylum for neurotics. What do you want to hang around with a bunch of neurotics for?”
Reds or something. A guy who must have gone crazy reading too many books at the U. But hell, all that was nothing in his young life. He thought how, after last night, he had begun to have a feeling of really being able to say to himself that he had a woman who was his own, his only. He had never thought of love in that way, of how it gave a guy that kind of a feeling, made him feel proud, important, confident in himself when he walked down the street.
“Where did Annie get her psychic powers?”
“One is born with them.”
He had felt so much different getting out of bed this morning from the way he had felt just two mornings ago. This morning he had not felt that he had a dull day ahead of him. He had been excited, and he had seemed to let his own excitement go out, and everything he looked at was not dull any more. He had awakened this morning with a whole new set of feelings.
“But, Hal, why don’t you wait and study more? You’re just young and what do you know about life? You’re only a college junior, and you set yourself up to make such criticisms. There’s a number of brainy men in the world who know more than you do.”
“Can it. You can’t convince me. I’m going down to this demonstration before the Japanese consulate, and that’s all.”
“But what’ll it get you?”
Nuts, all right. He looked out the window at the lake, seeing first one part of the water roll and dip, then another part rolling, and then a whole succession of waves coming in. And far out he saw a boat as if pasted against the gray sheet of horizon, smoke issuing from its stack in a pencil-line of steam. Just like a boat in a picture.
“Roosevelt Road,” a conductor bawled.
He watched people pass down the aisle. How many of the men getting off, or on the train, too, had been with a woman last night or this morning? And how many of the dames on the train had had guys? Every night there were thousands of guys with their women, and now